Dear CSS WG,
I am writing to you on behalf of the I18N Core WG. During a recent teleconference [1] I was actioned with responding to a recent thread on your mailing list [2].
Here's a quote of much of that email:
--
WebKit browsers don’t support this syntax for characters outside the
BMP: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76152 ...
There seems to be another way to escape these characters, namely by
breaking them up in UTF-16 code units: `\d834\df06 `. All browsers
except Gecko (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=717529)
seem to support this, even though this isn’t mentioned in the spec.
Should the spec be changed to reflect reality?
--
The Internationalization Core WG strongly opposes making such a change to the CSS spec. The Character Model [3] in requirement C045 requires that escape sequences be related to Unicode code point values, not to the code unit values used in some specific Unicode encoding (such as UTF-16). It is a barrier to content authors to have to convert escapes into UTF-16 surrogate pair sequences: it obfuscates the stylesheet, introduces additional processing complexity, and adds no value to support this syntax. Instead, user-agents should be encouraged to better meet the specification.
Regards (for I18N),
Addison
[1] http://www.w3.org/2012/01/25-i18n-minutes.html#item05
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/0536.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#sec-Escaping
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)
Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.